Bad News for Blu-ray?

[HankCastello]

Apple could skip Blu-ray discs altogether and head straight to streaming video online, if we believe two reports that have popped up over the past few days. Considering Apple’s history of picking winning technologies, that could signal bad news for Blu-ray.

http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2010/07/02/02gigaom-reports-apple-skipping-blu-ray-heading-straight-f-25197.html

[BillGrant]

Well... durrh. I've yet to have anyone get a blu-ray disc from me... I've delivered several HD files... I have no doubt. Bluray will be relgated to a storage format if that...
Bill

[Superfly]

Blu-Ray is gaining speed here in the bay area.  I've sold a few and even moreso in the event business than weddings.  PS3 now justifies itself (and my purchAse) be offering a BR player, a netflix streAmer and.....oh yeah, an incredible gaming system that I have fallen deeply in love with!

Further, video stores still offer them as do the redbox video rental machines in grocery stores.  I actually think HD is just catching on with most people and at $60 additional with dvr I think HD will be 10 years before it is the norm in households.

I think ps3 @299 will give blu-Ray some life for 10-15 years.  Remember how long DVDs took?  Streaming willbe the main format but I think there will be more $ to be had in BR too..

See how many brides take it when BR players are $50 and people see how HORRIBLE DVD looks.

Were still a long way from the $5 USB dongle.

Best,

Todd

[Superfly]

PS, I love my iPhone but Apple skipped Flash too, and apple calls a video ap an "innovation" while I've had them for 8 years on my other phones.

Todd

[kwshaw1]

It's been pretty obvious for some time now that Apple intends to skip the current HD movie delivery standard and hope that enough suckers...um, customers will stick to formats that help Apple make more money. Here in my area Blu-ray is a common upgrade and I've gotten at least one job specifically because I offer Blu-ray delivery.

Of course it can't hurt to offer delivery options tailored to Apple devices and portable media players in general, so no harm in doing that too.

[DavidPartington]

The speed of acceptance of BD is a combination of player price and disc price (movies).  BDs are still 3 or 4 times the cost of DVDs around here and while there are some special offers on players the average player is still way above £100 ($150).   If the players were cheaper AND the movies were comparable or only a small premium over DVDs then I think the change over would happen more quickly.  I just hope the people behind BD figure this out fast enough to actually make the market come alive before everyone jumps on the digital download and completely saturates the internet which is already creaking at the edges.

In terms of BD being a storage / backup medium - it's way too small for me already.  50GB dual layer discs are simply not big enough to store the AVCHD data from a wedding let alone the transcoded footage.  I also don't trust the longevity of the general media available today.

[kwshaw1]

Discs are too slow to burn for large amounts of data - kinda defeats the benefits of tapeless recording. Most folks seem to be making redundant hard drive backups, or you can back up your AVCHD data to...digital tape.   :-)

[ampsonic]

Anyone use anything like Mozy (www.mozy.com)as a redundant backup? It's an internet based backup service that offers unlimited backup for $5 / month. You'd have to have a fat connection, but it would just do it whenever your not around. I used them for a while for my personal backup.

[DavidPartington]

Anyone use anything like Mozy (www.mozy.com)as a redundant backup? It's an internet based backup service that offers unlimited backup for $5 / month. You'd have to have a fat connection, but it would just do it whenever your not around. I used them for a while for my personal backup.

I did look at this sort of thing but as you say - you'd need a very fat pipe to make it work.  It takes long enough to backup as it is!

After a LOT of investigation I decided to go with LTO-4 as my backup/archive strategy - and so far have no regrets.   I still have an (eSATA) Drobo 5 drive (10TB) online backup with the LTO-4 tapes providing additional off-line backup.    HDDs were giving me sleepless nights because I've had too many go down over the years!

(Edited by Admin to add Wikipedia links)

[mark-mvs]

I suppose the percentage of folks that have Blu-ray players also depends on what area of the country you're in and the age demographic you're considering. I work mostly in Southern California and with every wedding I've done so far, the client has requested a Blu-ray of their wedding video. (Of course I suspect some of them didn't have a Blu-ray players prior to their wedding and used $80 of their wedding gift money to go out and purchase one!)

Do you all remember, when Blu-ray players first came out? I remember the sold for $1200 at Best Buy!

Mark